Posts by Jeff Standen

Sticks and stones.

Hey Curtis,

Opinions are so subjective, but such vitriol is rather unbecoming for anyone.

If you'd taken the time to visit our project site or forums and voice your concerns constructively, you'd also see we're very strong critics of our own inefficiencies and kludge when they're discovered. Sometimes you don't find such things until people are pushing the system in a way that wasn't anticipated, but should be supported.

Our 4.0 release is the result of a 9 month rewrite to address community concerns on usability, simplicity and efficiency in such environments. This is a 5 year old project, most everybody understands improvement is an ongoing, iterative thing based on their thoughts and feedback.

I'm a developer on Cerberus Helpdesk!

Hey there, I'm the lead developer on Cerberus Helpdesk and ALSO a LT customer (we're mutual customers).

Our project has been around since January 2002, and there are a lot of people out there (18,900 companies at last count) running various older versions of the helpdesk. Our source code is 100% open (even on our free versions), which is a generally a great strength. But it also lets the creatively unscrupulous look for the tiniest cracks. I admire what Secunia is doing -- total transparency is important, and our customers have the power (through the source) to react as fast as we do to a new alert. There are a lot of talented people in our community who do just that.

Many of those things sneak in through the clutter of a long-running project that didn't start out intending to be so widely used. Over the past 9 months we've actually rewritten the project from scratch, using what we've learned over the years about maintainability on a wide-scale project.

While it's incredibly tragic when things like this happen, I promise it makes us even more vigilant in sensitivity of the work we're doing for people.

From the article:

"In Greek Mythology, Cerberus is the three-headed dog who stood guard over Hades. So why would marketers name a support desk app after a vicious canine responsible for tormenting damned souls trying to escape their frigid confines?"

Well I guess our first problem there, starting out, is we didn't have any marketers to slap the wrists of a bunch of programmers and tell them naming a project isn't a joke. ;) Our idea was that support was "hell", and we'd all rather be doing something else. Cerberus stood guard of our personal hell.

The thing is, we didn't start the project expecting 18,000 companies would be using it someday. We wrote the tool we needed and it clicked with a lot of people. Once we realized there was a need, we jumped on it -- but that was completely secondary to building the perfect tool for we needed.

That said, I think our community would have a fit if we tried to change the name at this point.

Levity aside, I'm not trying to make light of this situation. I'll extend my help to LT in making sure they're absolutely current on our updates. We've worked with them on scalability in the past, they know we're at their disposal.